Rancière studied philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris under the structuralist Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser. In 1969 he joined the philosophy faculty of the newly created Centre Universitaire Expérimental de Vincennes, which became the University of Paris VIII in 1971. He remained there until his retirement as professor emeritus in 2000. He also served as professor of philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.

Rancière contributed to the original French edition of Althusser’s Lire “Le Capital” (1965; Reading Capital), which attempted to elucidate a scientific theory of history in the later works of Karl Marx. Following the uprising of students and workers in Paris in May 1968, however, he broke with his former teacher, charging that Althusser’s emphasis on the necessary role of the intellectual vanguard (in disabusing the masses of bourgeois ideology) was contradicted by the self-directed popular revolts in the streets of Paris that year. In opposition to Althusser’s “theoreticist” Marxism, Rancière held that workers are perfectly capable of understanding their own oppression and of emancipating themselves without guidance from an elite class of theoreticians. He subsequently explored what he considered to be the common assumption among Western philosophers that workers are incapable of serious thought, arguing in Le Philosophe et ses pauvres (1983; The Philosopher and His Poor) that Western philosophy since Plato has defined itself in direct opposition to manual labour.

The central theme of Rancière’s educational and political philosophies is radical equality. According to him, the division of labour, responsibility, and power characteristic of inegalitarian social orders is based in part on spurious assumptions about differences in the mental capacities of individuals. The supposition that some people are naturally more intelligent than others is, he insists, unsupported by differences in educational achievement and other evidence, all of which can be accounted for in other ways. In Le Maître ignorant: cinq leçons sur l’émancipation intellectuelle (1987; The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation), he cited work by the 19th-century French educational theorist Jean-Joseph Jacotot to argue that anyone, no matter what his educational background, can teach anything to anyone else by using pedagogical techniques that enable students to discover and develop their own intellectual powers.

According to Rancière, all social orders are reinforced by and reflected in the “distribution of the sensible”—the complex of individuals and individual speech (“bodies” and “voices”) that are effectively visible, sayable, or audible (or invisible, unsayable, or inaudible), together with implicit assumptions about the natural capacities of different individuals and groups. In some societies, for example, blue-collar workers, the poor, the unemployed, immigrants, ethnic minorities, and other groups may be largely unrecognized and their aspirations, complaints, and interests not so much dismissed as simply unseen or unheard. Correlatively, workers as a class may be tacitly perceived as lazy, ignorant, and selfish. For Rancière, politics rightly understood is the inherently disruptive attempt by those who are victimized or excluded by inegalitarian social orders (“the part without part”) to assert themselves as the equals of those with privilege and power. To the extent that such efforts are successful, the distribution of the sensible is redrawn in more egalitarian ways.

In Rancière’s idiosyncratic usage, the term “police” refers to the rules and conventions that enforce inegalitarian distributions of the sensible, together with the broadly ideological beliefs and values that justify inegalitarian social orders as fair, democratic, inclusive, consensus-based, or in some sense natural or necessary. Examples of the latter include the public-private distinction, which is used to exclude salary disputes from the scope of public decision making; the notion of national cultural identity, which is used to support restrictions on the rights of immigrant groups; and the theme of political or economic “realism,” which is used to cast the inegalitarian status quo as necessary and to dismiss those who disagree as utopian dreamers. The function of the police is thus to prevent the outbreak of genuine politics as Rancière understands it.

One of the more original aspects of Rancière’s thought is his emphasis on the “aesthetic” dimension of politics and the “political” dimension of aesthetics. Politics is aesthetic in a broad sense insofar as it is concerned with the “sensible” distributions that constitute social hierarchies, and aesthetics is political in the sense that historically important conceptions of the nature of art and of the role of the artist—the broadest of which Rancière calls artistic “regimes”—determine distributions of the sensible in the artistic domain and lend insight into the distributions that characterize larger society.

Rancière distinguishes three artistic regimes: the ethical, the representational, and the aesthetic. Under the “ethical regime of images,” which he associates with the ideal state of Plato, art strictly speaking does not exist, and visual or literary images, understood as copies of things that are real or true, are produced only to reinforce the social order. The “representational regime of art,” which begins with Aristotle, defines hierarchies of artistic forms, recognizes the distinctive nature of artistic creativity, and frees the artist from direct service to the state, though his work is still expected to serve a salutary purpose. Under the “aesthetic regime of art,” which encompasses the rise of Modernism, the Classical hierarchies and conventions are overthrown in novel mixtures of forms and subjects; religious and aristocratic themes are replaced by those more closely approximating everyday life; and art is recognized as valuable in itself. Because it thus involves a radical assertion of equality against the hierarchies of art, the aesthetic regime, according to Rancière, serves as an analogue of political action against the hierarchies of society.

Rancière’s major published works, in addition to those mentioned above, include La Nuit des prolétaires (1981; The Nights of Labor: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-Century France), Mots de l’histoire: essai de poétique du savoir (1992; The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge), Partage du sensible: esthétique et politique (2000; The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible), and Le Spectateur émancipé (2008; The Emancipated Spectator).